Heart Depression

I have never been a person that was willing to put anything drug like in my body except liquor. Beings I was an old submarine sailor I did plenty of that but never any kind of drug. I had some kind of a painkiller once for a very bad root canal but that was it. "If you couldn't cure it or kill it with alcohol it wasn't worth having" anyway that was the saying on my first boat the USS Picuda (ss382) down in Key West in the early 60's. I was probably well on my way to being a full fledged alcoholic by the time my boat, the USS Snook (ssn592) went into drydock in Bremerton, WA. I got married to Dale Mae, my first and only wife, at this time. She managed to chase away the beer and forbade me from drinking Vodka [as in Martini] and somehow it worked. I basically sobered up for the rest of my life and even now I limit myself to 1 or 2 beers a week. Pretty good for any ex-subsailor. Well my problems with drugs started when I got old and had some heart problems. Hypertension it was, and finally turned into chest pains,etc. which culminated in an angioplasty to see what was wrong in there. The bad news was they found a pretty serious blockage but the good news was my heart/body created its own bypass called Angiogenesis , around the blockage, by growing a new one. It wasn't as good as the one God gave me with my original body but it would have to do. I have a bad family history of heart attack deaths in my family, on both sides, and I was scared to death about it all. My Cardiologist went after my high blood pressure with lots of drugs. First he took my regular blood pressure drug [Diovan] and doubled it, then he added a beta blocker, then an alpha blocker, topping it off with a gamma blocker, for nuclear attacks I believe. The last one is pure fabrication. All of these pills managed to knock my BP down to acceptable, but not great ranges [130/110]. Then he added a couple of water pills because he thought my legs were swelling up. I also had a prostrate problem and was taking Detrol LA, thank God for that because it seemed to keep the water pills in check. I really wasn't feeling very good. OK, but not at the top of my game. I became lethargic and I think depressed. I wasn't the happy, go-lucky lad I always was. About this time I stopped posting to this blog and wasn't interested in anyone's blog. I didn't smile very much, yelled at our help all the time and picked fights with everyone. I didn't like myself very well.

I decided I would rather risk a heart attack and be happy instead of like this so I started giving up the pills, one at a time. I took my blood pressure a couple of time a day to track what was happening. I gave everything up except the water pill, the Detrol LA and my origional BP medicine. You know what? My BP dropped to 110 over 80. Perfect. I started feeling better, my interests changed, I became happier and I got my desire back to post again to this blog. The down side to all of this was when I stopped with all of my pills, my hair stopped growing again. I was happier without hair anyway. I just had a yearly physical from my regular Dr. and he declared me fit in every way. Ain't life grand!